Sunday, December 18, 2011

A meditation on apes, corporate greed, feelings of extinction, and the loss of literacy #OccupyBarnesAndNoble

by Shawn Thompson

It's terrible to contemplate the death of a species
like the orangutan.

I've been thinking of various ways to try to
comprehend this unimaginable event. I imagine that extinction is a big death
similar in some ways to the small death of the individual.

But what jolted me into thinking about this in a
different way was the shock of strolling into my favourite Barnes and Noble
bookstore in Seattle this weekend and discovering that the bookstore will come
to an end on December 31, 2011. Good bye to the old year and hello to the new
era!

As a book author writing about orangutans and
someone concerned about literacy, a bookstore is my sacred space. In a
bookstore I see the people like me who cherish the flow of the written word
pass through the commercial arches.

Now the space in the fifth largest Barnes and Noble
store in the United States, in the readership district of the hinterland of the
University of Washington, shrinks day by day towards its demise at the end of
the year, one book at a time, just as the forest of orangutans shrinks one tree
at a time.

If we didn't have memories, we might not notice the
change and just think that the size of the shrinking forest has always been the
same.

Certainly corporations, whether book chains, mall
owners or the companies converting the rain forest to palm oil plantations,
must feel safe in the knowledge that people and orangutans feel powerless and simply
adjust to change over time. The annoying sounds they make in protest will
simply grow fainter and fainter.

I was talking to a frustrated and introverted
employee of Barnes and Noble, with the word Graham on his name plate, and
learning that he and the others were suddenly laid off, with one week's pay for
each year of bookselling, his dedication to books and literacy eroded over the
years by corporate insensitive and illiteracy. A customer came up while Graham
and I were discussing localized fate and
change, and when I asked the customer how she felt about the store closing, she
shrugged. It made her sad. "But there is nothing we can do," she said
and seemed uncomfortable that I wanted to discuss the issue. She wanted to buy
a book instead.

I had already told Graham that, as the author of a
book about the looming extinction of orangutans, I am a great supporter of lost
causes. Just because you think a cause is lost doesn't mean that you should
stop the fight.

But the change is relentless. The death of books.
The death of literacy. The death of a noble species of ape.

THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

In the case of the University Village mall in
Seattle, Graham told me that the mall corporation wanted to raise the rent of
Barnes and Noble while the bookstore had declining sales and was pruning its
sales staff over the years in a corporate reflex action. The book business in general has declining sales of hard copy books and a surge of sales of ebooks that doesn't compensate for the difference. Which means that a book author like me is a species under pressure.

Graham, who studied
literature in university and not the more relevant subject of corporate greed, also
said that the mall wants to chop up the Barnes and Noble space into smaller
stores to make more money, the same way land is subdivided for smaller house
lots to make it worth more. The responsibility to literacy in a devoted community
of readers around the university, in a city with one of the highest rates of
book consumption per capita in the
United States, doesn't matter as much as making a buck. No surprise. That we
know.

At the same time, in a mirror universe, the local University
Village bookstore was also in the clutches of its corporate office in New York,
which wouldn't let the local store support local writers, such as me as the
author of a book about orangutans living several blocks away. When corporate
headquarters decided it had sold enough of an orangutan book in Seattle, maybe
less than a dozen copies, it was no longer interested in stocking them on the
shelves. The importance of the cause underlying an orangutan book does not
matter to the corporation. The fate of the orangutan does not matter to the
palm oil plantation.

One of the issues I discussed with Graham was how
often you discover by chance a new interest by browsing in a bookstore. An old
statistic from ancient pre-web days said that 60 per cent of purchases in
bookstores came from people who bought on impulse in a bookstore. With fewer
bookstores, we will lose that. If a book chain does not take the responsibility
to stock its shelves with books worth stumbling over, then that opportunity
vanishes.

I bought several books on impulse after talking to
Graham, although I regretted that it would be no benefit to him personally. I
found a book by Jacques Derrida called The
Animal That I Therefore Am, which I didn't know existed until I saw it on
the shelf. Before that moment, I would not have known if it disappeared. The
back of the book says, "The book is at once an affectionate look back over
the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound
philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that
takes place as a result of the distinction -- dating from Descartes -- between
man as thinking animal and every other living species." The affectionate
and the profound are what I want, plus relationships with unincorporated
animals.

I also bought a cheap abridged paperback copy of
Alexander Dumas's novel The Count of
Monte Cristo, thinking it was somehow relevant to the experience of life
and would help.

When I took the books to the checkout counter, the
butch, overly tall woman at the cash register was being cheerful and said,
"Would you like to purchase a Barnes and Noble membership?" I
responded by reflex, in solidarity, by saying, "Why would I want to buy a
membership in a company that is closing this bookstore and laying off people
like you?"

IMAGINING
EXTINCTION

The psychology of all this is similar to the rain
forest and orangutans. The rain forest is like the space of the bookstore and
the orangutan the individual literacy that inhabits it. Orangutans, after all,
discover things, create their own culture and share what they learn with the
group. That is basic rain forest literacy. Losing just one orangutan is like
losing the information in a book. And it can't be replicated by a printing
press.

Part of the genius of Jane Goodall is to recognize
the importance of an individual ape in this way. She says in a collection
called The Great Ape Project,
"Each chimpanzee has a unique personality and each has his or her own
individual life history ... And we find that individual chimpanzees can make a
difference to the course of chimpanzee history, as is the case with
humans."

That reminds me of what the science fiction writer
Ray Bradbury called "the butterfly effect." Change one tiny element
and it has a huge ripple effect accumulating and amplifying over a long period
of time. The loss of the effect of the individual could be great over time.

So when we talk about the extinction of a species of
ape we are talking about an abstraction and not the effect of the loss to the
whole of the individual. Extinction is bad enough, but the loss of an
individual can have a ripple effect. And you are never aware of what you have
lost.

So the printed book is doomed. The rain forest is
doomed. The orangutan is doomed.

How would an orangutan feel about a shrinking forest? Photo by Shawn Thompson

IMAGINING EXTINCTION

What does extinction feel like? Can we imagine
something so big and terrible?

I wonder if an orangutan would feel like me
wandering around the shrinking space in my local bookstore habitat and feeling
the palpable way that the absence is expanding, like a big godly thumb pressing
down on my small squishy soul. It makes me feel the personal presence of it
all. Maybe the Count of Monte Cristo could deal with the experience, but not
me.

I was curious what sections of books would disappear
first and what kind of strategy there was, probably mapped out by consultants
for the corporation, to lessen the sense that books are disappearing. The
westerns were gone first and a selection of Science Fiction and children's books. Book
shelves were removed to eliminate the traces that something was missing on the shelves.

I tried to imagine what this would be like for an
orangutan. Every morning you wake up and a few more trees are gone. The
sunlight is breaking through the edges of your forest more. The annoying mechanical
and human sounds from outside are growing closer and muffled less by the buffer
of trees.

In the bookstore, I felt myself herded to the
sections of books that remained, a kind of unconscious adaptive strategy. The
variety is shrinking. Some pleasures and interests are vanishing. I try to
compensate by other pleasures and interests so that I won't notice and feel bad.

For an orangutan in the forest, the variety of fruit
trees is shrinking. Maybe during the day you retreat more to the higher parts
of a tree or to the shifting centre of the forest. At night, maybe you don't
sleep as deeply. You dream of vague vanished pleasures and interests and when
you wake up try to enjoy the fruit that remains. How conscious are you of
missing fruit?

In the bookstore, as the number of books diminishes,
so do the fellow book lovers. I am feeling more and more solitary. I am more
aware of myself in an emptiness that is growing larger. I feel smaller but more
important too.

For the orangutan, already solitary, the orangutans
out in the trees that you once heard and saw from time to time are diminishing.
There are more human beings invading the jungle. There are fewer social
pleasures. Fewer dating opportunities. More compromises.

I think my mind had drifted a bit in the bookstore
and then I felt that Graham had exhausted what he wanted to say. Maybe he felt
embarrassed that he had revealled too much about his private pain.

I could see that Graham the crushed and introverted
former idealist felt powerless, his world, his dreams, his ambitions, his small
role in literacy, devastated. He had trouble looking me in the eye, but thanked
me for listening patiently to his long tale and then shook my hand with the iron
power one expects from a dock worker, not a distracted dispenser of books.

GOING
HOME

I went home to tell my partner Wendy the disaster.
The best thing about our location in Seattle is being close to a huge literacy
space and the abundance of urban trees. Our street is noisy with traffic, which
I don't like.

Wendy understood right away and gave me a big hug
and then told me the other disastrous news. Our 14-year-old dog Emo had consumed
five chocolate bars he found cached in a bedroom, which could send his already fluttery
heart into death throes. It's what I call the chocolate "flush." Very healthy. No need to go into details.

So it was not a good moment as I sat down in a white
heat to write this account.

Maybe this is akin to what it is like to feel the green
and fluid wave of corporate greed sweep over a forest and a species.

In losing orangutans, we are losing a kind of
literacy, a kind of literate space. I feel another dimension of that now. I
feel the handshake from an individual orangutan saying goodbye.

On December 31, 2011, at the arbitrary afternoon hour
of 1 p.m., I will spend an hour by myself in the Barnes and Noble bookstore in
the University Village mall in Seattle meditating in one of their upholstered
chairs on the death of species and literate spaces and how powerless we feel. Orangutans
and the rain forest will be in my mind. Then I will go home to Wendy and the
dog and eat Chinese vegetarian dumplings.

Background information: The University Village mall in Seattle is owned by Sloan Capital, which is owned by Seattle sixty-something businessman StuartM. Sloan, who has dabbled in grocery stores and a vineyard in California.

The Christmas card I sent this year to mall owner Stuart Sloan with a Christmas wish.

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CURIOUS ABOUT THIS BLOG?

This blog is the work of SHAWN THOMPSON, writer, university professor and author of the 2010 book THE INTIMATE APE: Orangutans and the Secret Life of a Vanishing Species. Shawn is now continuing to spread the good word about orangutans and the other apes any way he can.He is member of the board of Gary Shapiro's charitable foundation The Orang Utan Republik and will help writers and organizations promoting orangutans. He is also available to speak without a fee to any group that is interested in orangutans. Shawn lives in Kamloops, British Columbia.